Tag Archives: tradition

The Roman Catholic Controversy: Catholic Epistemology

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The Roman Catholic Controversy

This is the seventh post in my series on James R. White’s The Roman Catholic Controversy. This post is the second part of my review of Chapter 6, “The Thousand Traditions.” Part One.

I should thank James White for introducing me to a new concept in the understanding of Catholicism, of which before I was unaware. His intentions in pointing it out, of course, were to expose a weakness in the foundations of the Catholic Church; but his demonstration has only served to further prove how solid that foundation is. He also alerted me to a position that opponents of the faith attempt to exploit, that to the unlearned might appear to be a weakness.

White challenges that there are two major positions Catholics hold with regard to the “nature, extent, and authority of tradition,” that are logically “completely at odds with each other” and “mutually exclusive.” In fact, the question relates to none of these things; rather, he admits, it pertains to the “sufficiency or insufficiency of Scripture.” At issue is Catholic epistemology: How Catholics know what we know. White does not call it thus here, but I believe he does in other places, and it is an appropriate term for the questions he asks and the charges he makes.

The question is relevant to White, because from his perspective, if Catholics can’t adequately explain the sources and transmission of their revelation, then they must not have any good reason for believing what they believe.  But he misrepresents the nature of the disagreement among Catholics. Both positions accept the authority of both Scripture and Tradition. Both positions hold that both Scripture and Tradition are real, finite bodies of received knowledge. Both positions hold that both Scripture and Tradition are essential elements of divine revelation on which Catholic dogma is founded. The disagreement does not call the “nature, extent, [or] authority” of Tradition into question; rather, it has everything to do with the “nature, extent, and authority” of Scripture. The underlying question is how we know what we know. There is no doubt that we know it.

The matter is only this: Does divine revelation exist partly in Scripture, and partly in Tradition?—that is, some Catholic doctrines are found in only Tradition that are not found at all in Scripture—or does the fullness of divine revelation exist both in Scripture and Tradition?—that is, all Catholic doctrines can be found in Scripture, even if only implicitly. The former view, which White calls the partim-partim view (Latin for partly … partly), holds that Scripture is materially insufficient—that it lacks essential material to present a full picture of God’s revelation. The latter view, which White calls the material sufficiency view, holds that Scripture is in fact materially sufficient—that it contains the full material of God’s revelation, even if some of it is only represented implicitly—but that Tradition is still necessary to discover and interpret the revelation in Scripture. Both views hold that we have received our doctrine from Scripture and Tradition. The only real difference is these positions’ view of Scripture; and White’s only real dispute with either of them is that neither holds Scripture to be solely sufficient. I will discuss these views in greater detail below [i.e. in the next post].

First I want to examine White’s charge that these views are “mutually exclusive,” that they create doctrinal confusion, and that they result in statements that are “often more liable . . . to various interpretations” than even the disparate interpretations of Protestants under sola scriptura. I fail to see how any point of this charge can be sustained—and in fact, White doesn’t sustain it; he does not mention this charge again after his introduction. These two views of Scripture are not “mutually exclusive” doctrinal positions that Catholics are expected to hold; they amount to only a minor theological question that in no way affects the outcome of Catholic doctrine. Whether one believes that Scripture supports all doctrine or not, all Catholics agree that between Scripture and Tradition, our doctrine is supported—and more important, proponents of either position can demonstrate this support in texts. There is no doctrinal confusion, since all doctrine is pronounced by the Magisterium, and the Magisterium speaks with one voice, regardless of the views of its individual members. The charge that this difference of opinion results in ambiguous statements that are open to various interpretations is empty, since the only authoritative interpretation is that of the Magisterium. If there is any ambiguity in interpretation, the Magisterium speaks again to clarify.

White attempts to make much of the point that the Tridentine Fathers—the Fathers of the Council of Trent—had a disagreement regarding these points. The original draft of the Decree concerning the Canonical Scriptures (which White never properly cites—I had to track it down myself) reads that revelation is passed on “partly in written books, partly in unwritten traditions,” supporting the partim-partim view. Upon debate, this was changed in the final draft to state that revelation is “contained in the written books and unwritten traditions”—allowing for the support of proponents of the material sufficiency view. This point is insignificant, and the fact that it was disputed is entirely irrelevant. The important fact is that the Magisterium reached an agreement and spoke with one voice to pronounce and clarify Catholic doctrine.

The Magisterium has agreed on Catholic doctrine and pronounced it with authority. Certainly if White means to charge that this doctrine is invalid because of a difference in theological opinion among the Magisterium’s members regarding the means of revelation, then Protestant doctrine suffers from an even greater problem, since the many disparate Protestant groups cannot agree on the content of doctrine let alone its means of revelation. This disagreement is analogous to the legal philosophies of strict constructionism versus loose constructionism among the members of the United States Supreme Court—that is, should the Constitution be interpreted strictly and literally by its letter, or should it be interpreted more loosely by the intent of its framers in the context of evolving legal and political situations? Regardless of what philosophy the individual justices of the court hold, once the court reaches a decision, its ruling is legally binding: when the court speaks, that is the law. Likewise, when the Magisterium speaks, that is doctrine.

The Roman Catholic Controversy: Tradition and the Magisterium

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The Roman Catholic Controversy

This sixth post in my series on James R. White’s The Roman Catholic Controversy. I am really getting bogged down with this. White’s chapters aren’t getting longer, but my responses to them are. I reckon his accusations are growing more and more onerous and his tone more and more condemning, and I feel there is a lot more that needs to be answered. My response to this chapter, “The Thousand Traditions,” is expanding to monumental proportions; so I’ve decided to split it up into segments. I regret that anyone who reads this chapter will not have my full review in one succinct piece; but I am sure my readers will be thankful that I don’t dump the whole tome on you at once.

In this chapter, “The Thousand Traditions,” White seeks to undermine the Catholic concepts of Sacred Tradition and doctrinal development. As he has throughout the book, White continues to demonstrate a lack of understanding of basic Catholic positions. He attempts to equate the undeniable doctrinal confusion among the diverse Protestant sects with differences of theological opinion among orthodox Catholics regarding the origin and function of Tradition. In comparison to the many interpretations that result from sola scriptura, according to White, “statements of Rome are not only equally as liable to various interpretations, but often more liable.” “Even on the issue of tradition itself,” White argues, “there are a thousand ‘traditions,’ a thousand different ways of understanding the ‘final’ word on the matter.” White in fact discusses two positions, neither of which has any bearing on the interpretation or finality of the Magisterium’s rulings. [I will get to these in the next post, hopefully.]

Tradition and the Magisterium

White continues to struggle with a basic definition of Tradition. He believes, as he argued in previous chapters, that “tradition” is something nebulous and undefined, until it is defined by the Church itself. In examining the Church’s claims that both Scripture and Tradition are necessary for the authentic interpretation of the Word of God, White charges that “not only is Rome claiming the exclusive right of interpretation of the Scriptures but the exclusive right of both definition and interpretation of tradition.” White asserts that Tradition is effectively whatever the Church says it is. “When we ask to see the contents of tradition, we have to depend upon the veracity of the same Church that bases her doctrines . . . on those very traditions!” White once again accuses the Church of “circular reasoning” in its claims to authority. “Because Rome defines tradition itself, you have ‘Scripture and Church,’ not ‘Scripture and tradition.’”

The Church does not define tradition. The Church receives tradition. Tradition is not something vague and nebulous, but something real and substantial. Tradition is the entire body of knowledge that has been passed down through all the ages of the Church. It subsists in the writings of the Fathers, thinkers, theologians; music, hymnody, and liturgy; monuments and inscriptions; art and architecture — documents of all kinds; whatever exists that sheds light on that which has been passed down by Christians before. These documents are visible, tangible, and accessible, not just to the elite circle of the Magisterium, but to anyone who seeks them. Increasingly, the documents that define the Tradition on which Catholic dogma rests are published and available online.

What the Church does is select and interpret tradition. Out of this vast body of received tradition, the Magisterium chooses out the elements that are relevant and applicable to the questions of faith that are being asked, and interprets what they mean. White charges that “Rome has a ‘supreme rule of faith’”  that “does not exist outside of her own realm of authority” — that “the Roman Catholic Church defines and interprets the rule as she sees fit.” The Church’s rule of faith is Scripture and Tradition, read and interpreted by the Magisterium. Scripture and Tradition are received, immutable, and eminently authoritative in and of themselves. (White charges also that since the Church defines the canon of Scripture, the Catholic Church nullifies the authority of Scripture, since it can effectively pick and choose what it wants. This is a preposterous claim, since the canon of Scripture is itself immutable and has existed unchanged since the Church defined it originally.) The interpretations of the Magisterium are defined and limited by the truths that Scripture and Tradition reveal: it cannot create, produce, define, or present what isn’t there.

But by the act of selecting the elements of tradition that are relevant, isn’t the Church “defining” tradition? Can’t the Church pick and choose only what supports the conclusions it wants to arrive at? In theory, it could — but it would be guilty of dishonesty and deception. And since the entire body of tradition is open for all eyes to see, its dishonesty and deception would be transparent and self-evident. If the Magisterium arbitrarily ignored or dismissed conflicting evidence without cause (some conflicting evidence is in fact dismissed with cause — for example, the Gnostic gospels), then any observer or critic would have ample ammunition to attack the Magisterium’s decisions.

There is a clear analogy between the work of the Magisterium and the work of a scholar — for in fact the principles which guide the modern Magisterium are scholastic principles, invented by the Church and only borrowed by secular scholars. Let us suppose an historian, since I am most familiar with that discipline. Just as an historian chooses the sources from the body of accumulated knowledge with which to build an argument, the Church chooses sources from tradition on which to base dogma. The Church is no guiltier of “defining” tradition than the scholar is of “defining” history. The historian meticulously documents his sources, giving the reader the trail by which to check his sources and verify that his arguments are correctly founded and reasoned. If he has built a specious or poorly founded argument, his peers and critics will recognize it. Likewise, the Magisterium meticulously documents the sources of its dogma, and even publishes them and makes them freely available, so that anyone can follow the trail of its arguments and verify that they are well founded. Rather than being opaque, nebulous, and esoteric, the Tradition of the Church is eminently transparent, solid, and public.

White charges that “Rome loudly proclaims her fidelity to the Scriptures and insists that the Church is subject to the Scriptures” while actually “[making] statements that plainly elevate her own Magisterium to the highest position of authority.” White fails to present these “plain” statements. In fact, the Magisterium is subject to and bound by what Scripture and Tradition reveal; its authority is only as interpreter, arbiter, teacher, and servant, to read Scripture and Tradition and discern the truth that it reveals. It can neither promulgate truth not revealed by Scripture and Tradition nor contradict that truth.

White complains that in the Catechism (CCC 83), “Tradition is to be distinguished from the various theological, disciplinary, liturgical or devotional traditions, born in the local churches over time,” and that these “lesser” traditions “can be retained, modified or even abandoned under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium.” He argues that the Magisterium is free to dismiss what it doesn’t wish to be authoritative as not “real” tradition. But there is a clear, qualitative difference that White fails to grasp between these local traditions — for example, the Benedictine tradition or Franciscan tradition — and the Tradition that binds the entire Church.

White believes that the Catholic Church claims “no one else can properly interpret [the] Scriptures” — but in fact the claim is that only the Magisterium can interpret the Scriptures properly and with binding authority. The Church encourages exegetes and theologians to study Scripture and interpret it to the full extent of their ability. Their judgment informs and supports the Magisterium. Because the Church also claims to be “the sole guardian of ‘Sacred Tradition,’” White argues, there are “no external checks and balances . . . that could correct her should she err.” Of course, the very idea of an ultimate authority precludes the notion of “checks and balances.” But the Church believes the Magisterium does not err. We are taught that the Holy Spirit will guide the Church into all truth (John 16:13). Practically, the possibility of error is limited by the necessity of consensus among all the assembled bishops for an authoritative ruling.

In the end, White insists “that the Magisterium, by its own teachings, cannot logically maintain that it is a servant of the Word of God.” The only logical position it can take, he claims, is that of “‘overseer’ of the Sacred Scriptures, a position that demands a superior authority than that vested in the Bible itself.” White’s logic is flawed. How does the claim of the Magisterium to have authority in interpreting Scripture require that it be a “superior” authority over Scripture, any more than the individual, sola scriptura believer’s claim to have authority in interpreting Scripture require him to be a “superior” authority? In both cases, a party is exercising informed judgment to interpret Scripture. In both cases, Scripture has the superior authority, and the interpreter is bound and subject to the words and truths it contains.

White charges that the Church’s claim to “only [be] teaching what has been handed to her” is patently false. Suggesting such doctrines as the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption of Mary, and Papal Infallibility, he intends to demonstrate that this claim is false, and that “such doctrines were not ‘handed on’ by the Apostles, and . . . were unknown to the early Christians.” “It is obvious” (emphasis mine), “that Rome has drawn from traditions that are not Apostolic.” White offers no such evidence of these claims here — in fact, it is not “obvious” at all. Later in the chapter he addresses Catholic epistemology and doctrines of theological development; it will be more expedient for me to address these claims there.

Too Many Jameses: Untangling Jesus’s Family and Friends

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Apostle St. James the Greater, by El Greco (1606).

Apostle St. James the Greater, by El Greco (1606).

This is a little reflection I meant to make a few months ago on May 3, the Feast of Saints Philip and James, regarding the confusion about who that particular Saint James, the son of Alphaeus, actually is. But I got busy that day and didn’t post. Today is the Feast of Saint James the Greater, the son of Zebedee, and while there’s no confusion about who he is, this post is still nibbling at me, and I don’t want to wait until next May 3. It’s still kind of relevant.

Because there are at least two or three men in the New Testament named James. And that’s really no surprise — because there were no doubt thousands of men with that name in Judea in the first century. The name translated James in English comes from the name Ιάκωβος (Iakōbos) in the Greek New Testament. Yes, you guessed it; that’s the name יעקב (ya‛ăqôb) in Hebrew — the Old Testament Jacob in English. James is named for Jacob, Israel himself, the patriarch of the Jewish people.

James II, by Peter Lely

James II of England, by Peter Lely.

Francis II, Jacobite King

All hail His Majesty King Francis II, our rightful king.

(The name becomes Iacobus or Jacobus in Latin, giving rise, in English history, to the terms Jacobean, pertaining to the period of King James I's reign, and Jacobite, the name for the restorationist followers of the deposed King James II and his line of Stuart pretenders to the throne. James was removed for being Catholic, and for his tolerance toward English Catholics, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which I now see to have been not so glorious. Some of my ancestors, apparently, were Scottish Jacobites, and were exiled to America for taking part in the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, in support of James’s grandson Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Maybe I have some Catholic ancestors after all? Bonnie Prince Charlie and his father, James Francis Edward Stuart, styled James III by the Jacobites, are buried (1) in high Catholic honor (2) in the Grottoes of St. Peter’s Basilica. I’m no longer sure how I feel about the “Glorious” Revolution or the Jacobites. James II was pretty well lawfully usurped, at least in as much as usurpation is ever lawful. I now see, though, that this is a history of which I know very little. The intolerance and persecution toward Catholics that spurred it was certainly not a good thing. I hope you have enjoyed this rabbit trail as much as I have.)

Anyway — to the matter at hand. There were a lot of Jameses in Judea at the time of Christ. James the Greater, the Apostle celebrated today, was so called to distinguish him from the other Apostle named James, the son of Alphaeus (Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15). James the Greater, we know, was the son of Zebedee (Mark 1:19, 3.17, etc.) and the brother of John. He and John were called by the Lord Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17). In Jesus’s Aramaic, scholars reckon, this was probably בנירגיש (bnê•rğaš), lit. “sons of tumult,” or בנירגז (bnê•rğaz), lit. “sons of anger” — or as Aramaic scholar Maurice Casey supposes, בנירעם (bnê•r`am), the most literal Aramaic translation of “sons of thunder,” the result of a poor transliteration from Aramaic into Greek. So apparently, James and John were rather hot-headed, as we see in Scripture (Luke 9:51–56).

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were fellow fishermen with their father, and the associates of Simon Peter and his brother Andrew — or possibly their competitors (Mark 1:16–20). They were among the first disciples to follow Jesus, and with Simon Peter, formed His most intimate circle, who were chosen to witness His Transfiguration (Luke 9:28–36, etc.). We know that Saint James was the first of the Apostles to suffer martyrdom (Acts 12:1–3), about A.D. 44, perhaps having provoked Herod’s wrath on account of his temper.

Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moor-slayer)

Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moor-slayer), according to Spanish legend, appeared at the Battle of Clavijo to fight the Moors alongside the Spanish Christian army.

Saint James is the patron saint of Spain. According to Spanish legend, James ministered there, then sailed back to Jerusalem to meet his martyrdom. His relics were then transported back to Spain, either by his disciples or miraculously by angels, where they are said to be venerated in Santiago de Compostela (the Spanish name Santiago is actually Sant’Iago, or Saint James). Saint James’s patronage is a pious legend of the utmost importance to the Spanish, as fanciful as it seems. It is not out of the question that James went to Spain, a province of the Roman Empire; travel there in the first century was certainly possible. Paul desired to minister there, according to his Epistle to the Romans, written ca. A.D. 57 (Romans 15:22–24). According to the tradition of the Early Church, he did before his death.

So what of the other Jameses? There are three others mentioned in the New Testament: James, the son of Alphaeus, one of the Twelve (Mark 3:18, etc.); James, the brother of the Lord (Mark 6:3, Galatians 1:19); and James, the son of “the other” Mary (Matthew 27:56, etc.). Depending on what scholar you ask, two of these — or even all three — may refer to the same person.

Saint James the Just

Saint James the Just.

In history we say that there are lumpers and splitters. Catholic biblical scholars, especially the early ones, tended to be lumpers, desiring to make connections in Scripture, identify people and places with each other, and generally to lump ideas together. Protestants, on the other hand, perhaps by their very nature, are splitters, inclined to tear apart and question what is traditional and speculative and what Catholics have put together, especially where there lacks explicit evidence. The study of the biblical Jameses is a prime example of these tendencies.

There is very little known about the three other Jameses, aside from the few times they are mentioned in Scripture. Both Catholics and Protestants tend to agree that James, the brother of the Lord, was known in the Early Church as James the Just, and was the first bishop of Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1–13) and the author of the Epistle of James.

Catholic tradition records little about the Apostle James the Less, the son of Alphaeus. Orthodox tradition tradition holds that he first ministered in southwestern Palestine, then in Lower Egypt, where he met his martyrdom at Ostracine. Beyond this point, there is much Catholic conjecture.

Madonna and Child, by Carlo Maratta (c. 1660).

Madonna and Child, by Carlo Maratta (c. 1660).

First, Catholics and Orthodox do not believe that James the Just, the “brother” (ἀδελφός) of the Lord, was actually the brother of the Lord, or the son of Mary, who never bore another child. There is scriptural evidence to support this. When Joseph and Mary journeyed with the boy Jesus to Jerusalem (Luke 2:41–51), there is no mention of any other children. When Jesus, from the Cross, entrusted his mother Mary to John (John 19:25–27), it would make little sense for John to take Mary into his home if she had other children living. There are at least two views, then, of who the “brethren of the Lord” are: Either they are children of Joseph by a prior marriage (tradition holds Joseph to have been an older man and widower), or they are other close kinsmen of Jesus, perhaps cousins. The Aramaic language has no word for “cousin,” and used the word for “brother” instead, which could connote any relative. According to this view, when the Gospel was recorded in Greek, it followed this linguistic convention (the word ἀδελφός in Greek likewise can connote any relative).

St. James the Less, by El Greco.

St. James the Less, by El Greco (c. 1595).

And with this, the plot thickens considerably. If the “brethren of the Lord,” and our James the Just, are in fact Jesus’s cousins, who are their parents? Catholic scholars, beginning with the earliest of the Church Fathers, have made inferences based on these three verses of Scripture:

  • “. . . but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” (John 19:25)
  • “. . . among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.” (Matthew 27:56)
  • “There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger (ὁ μικρός, young, small, less) and of Joses, and Salome.” (Mark 15:40).

If we suppose, as appears to be the case, that all three verses refer to the same group of women who witnessed the Crucifixion, then it appears:

  1. Mary the mother of James and Joses (or Joseph) in Matthew and Mark, is the same woman as Mary the wife of Clopas in John.

  2. Salome in Mark is the same woman as the mother of the sons of Zebedee in Matthew.

  3. Depending on how one punctuates the Greek of John, either Mary the wife of Clopas (#1) or Salome the wife of Zebedee (#2) is the sister of our Lord’s mother in John. (The former would require that Mary had a sister named Mary, but this would not be unheard of, since Mary, or Miriam, was also a very common Jewish name, and one or both of the women may have had other names.)

  4. That would mean that either James and John, the sons of Zebedee and Salome, are the cousins of Jesus; or that James and Joses (or Joseph), the sons of Clopas and Mary, are the cousins of Jesus. The former would make some sense, since Jesus clearly had a close relationship with James and John, and entrusted his mother to John, who would have been her nephew.

  5. But the latter makes possibly more sense, since we are told that two of Jesus’s “brethren” were named James and Joses (Mark 6:3) or Joseph (Matthew 13:55). Mark refers, at the Crucifixion, to the “mother of James and Joses,” and Matthew refers to the “mother of James and Joseph.” It seems remarkable that Mark would spell the latter name Joses (Ἰωσῆ) both in reference to the Lord’s “brother” and to the second of the latter pair, when he was perfectly capable of also using the name Joseph (Ἰωσήφ) (Mark 15:43). It would appear, then, that this James and Joses, the Lord’s “brethren,” were in fact the children of Clopas and Mary.

  6. We can presume from the fact that the Evangelists identified “the mother of James and Joses” that James and Joses were people with whom the Early Church was familiar. Certainly the Early Church was familiar with James the Just, bishop of Jerusalem. If this James the Less (ὁ μικρός) is in fact implied to be James the brother of the Lord, then it seems James the Just and James the Less are the same person.

But is this James the Less (ὁ μικρός) the same man as the Apostle often referred to as James the Less? What of this last James, the son of Alphaeus? Some Catholic scholars, in their endless lumping, have suggested that Clopas (Κλωπᾶς), the father of James and Joses above, and Alphaeus (Ἀλφαῖος) are in fact the same man — meaning that all three of the obscure Jameses, James the Just the brother of our Lord, James the son of Clopas and Mary, and the Apostle James the Less, are one and the same man. The supposition that undergirds this is that Clopas had two names. Some have suggested that Clopas and Alphaeus were different transliterations of the same Aramaic name; but this doesn’t seem likely (the difficulty of this issue is discussed in Clopas’s article in the Catholic Encyclopedia). A secondary name, though, isn’t out of the question.

Apostle Judas Thaddeus, by Van Dyck

Apostle Judas Thaddeus, by Anthonis van Dyck (c. 1620).

Further, we know that Jude, author of the Epistle of Jude, is the brother of James (Jude 1), certainly James the Just, making him also the “brother” of the Lord, the Judas mentioned by Mark and Matthew. Catholic scholars have also identified this Jude with the Apostle Judas Thaddeus (Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:16). Most recent English translations of the Bible (including Catholic ones) translate Jude in Luke’s lists (here and in Acts 1:13) as “Judas son of James” — but the Greek actually reads Ἰούδας Ἰακώβου, literally Judas of James, with no relation made explicit. Jude may have been so identified by relation to his brother, the better-known James the Just, since James had already been listed; and traditional Catholic translations (the Douay-Rheims) read Judas brother of James. Jude likewise identifies himself by relation to his brother James in his epistle.

St. Simon the Zealot, by Rubens

St. Simon the Zealot, by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1611).

But we Catholics aren’t quite done lumping. The last of Jesus’s “brethren” (Mark 6:3) was named Simon. Wasn’t there another Apostle named Simon, Simon the Zealot? James son of Alphaeus, Judas Thaddeus, and Simon the Zealot (or the Cananaean) are always listed together in the lists of the Apostles. Some Catholic scholars have taken that as a hint, together with the coincidence that Jesus also had “brethren” named James, Judas, and Simon, and supposed that the two sets might be connected. They have identified Simon the Zealot as another “brother” of the Lord. Further, some have also identified him with Simeon (or Simon), who succeeded James the Just (his brother?) as bishop of Jerusalem.

Paul lends some credence to the notion that at least two of the Lord’s brothers were members of the apostolic party: “Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (1 Corinthians 9:5). In increasing order of importance, Paul lists: (1) the other apostles, (2) the brothers of the Lord, and (3) Cephas, or Peter, the chief Apostle. Together, this statement seems to refer to the Twelve, and includes “the brothers of the Lord” among them.

All in all, it seems as if Jesus’s evangelic enterprise may have been something of a family affair. Two sets of brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew, and James and John; and possibly three of His own “brethren.” Of course, none of this is verified or can ever be verified. But it is traditions like these, enriching to the story and harmless if untrue, that make our Catholic faith full, rich, and beautiful.

The Veneration of Mary: An Introduction for Protestants

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The Immaculate Conception

The Immaculate Conception (1670), by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, my favorite painter of the Virgin.

So since I’ve been on the defensive for the past week (really the posts about indulgences were part of the same strand), I thought now seemed the right time to address another major aspect of Catholicism that Protestants have difficulty with, that is very often misunderstood: the veneration of Mary.

This is a huge issue. Part of the reason I’ve never gone there in these pages before is that it’s something that I have struggled with also, so it has been a sensitive spot. But I now feel secure enough to address it. This will be the first of many posts on this subject, I have no doubt. But I wanted to briefly share some basic ideas and explanations, to introduce especially my Protestant brethren to these concepts, and tell how this fits into the story of my journey.

My First Steps with Mary

Despite hearing allegations growing up, I don’t recall ever thinking that Catholics “worship” Mary. Especially as I learned about the Catholic Church in school, I always stood up to defend the Church when such attacks arose. But what I did think, growing up and even recently as I approached the Church, was that Catholics overemphasized Mary, gave her an unbiblical role in the story of salvation and an inappropriate degree of veneration.

In fact, if anything jeopardized my journey or threatened to turn me from my Catholic path, it was doubts about Mary. I had been attending Mass for about six months without a problem, and was just about to begin RCIA (and this blog), when all of a sudden and without warning, they hit, and hit hard. My friends Audrey and Jeff had just given me my first Rosary — perhaps that’s what brought me face to face with my doubts. But then, there they were. I could no longer evade them; it was either go through them, or leave this road.

My deepest doubt about Mary and Catholicism was that so much of the doctrine about her wasn’t in the Bible. Even after I had let go of sola scriptura (which happened fairly early in my quest), it seemed wrong that these ideas seemed to come out of nowhere at very late dates. For example, the doctrines of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption were not declared dogma until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So what, then? Did they just make these up? I talked to Audrey; I talked to Brad; I e-mailed several other dear Catholic friends; I e-mailed Father Joe, asking questions and searching. I am very grateful for everyone who took the time to talk to me and reply.

But what brought me through these doubts more than anything was reading. My historian’s heart yearned to get to the root of these doctrines. Every other aspect of Catholic doctrine could be traced through the entire history of the Church — could these? I have no doubt that the Holy Spirit guided me to Fr. Luigi Gambero’s Mary and the Church Fathers, a book that seemed to be specifically tailored to my desires and needs. Gambero steps through the entire history of the Church, from the earliest Apostolic Fathers (the first generation after the Apostles) to the end of the Patristic Age (about the eighth century), and taking each Father, examines his thought and writings about Mary.

Through Gambero’s book, I found that every single doctrine that the Church holds about Mary has existed in some form since the very earliest days of Christianity. Some ideas were slow to develop into the fully-bloomed doctrines we know today — but every idea was born in seeds planted by the Apostles. In the days since I’ve discovered this, my love and my devotion for Mary has been ever-growing; she has a very special place in my heart.

The Assumption

The Assumption of the Virgin (1670), by Murillo.

Marian Doctrines

What are some of those doctrines, that are particular to the Catholic and Orthodox churches? I will enumerate them here. Many of these, to Protestant eyes, will seem fanciful and far-fetched: I thought so, too. But every one of them can be attested to in Tradition very early on. Many of them have at least some scriptural support. None of them conflict with Scripture. I will, in posts to come, examine each of these doctrines in greater depth, and give quotations from the Fathers to chart the blossoming of these ideas.

  • A prefatory word: Catholics don’t worship Mary. We honor her; we love her; we venerate her; but we fully acknowledge that she was a human just as we are. We venerate her as we venerate the saints, only more so: she was the first Christian, the first one to believe in Jesus, and as His mother, someone who was very special to our Lord, and so she is special to us. She is the most honored of all the saints.

  • Mary’s Perpetual Virginity — The Church believes that Mary was a virgin her whole life; that not only when Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, but even through his birth, her virginity remained physically intact; and that following Jesus’s birth she never engaged in sexual relations, though married to Joseph, and never bore any other children. Mary’s womb, having borne the Son of God, was a sacred and consecrated vessel. Jesus’s “brothers” and “sisters” (Matthew 12:46, 13:55; Mark 3:31-34, 6:3; Luke 8:19-20; John 2:12, etc.) — or “brethren” — are not the children of Joseph and Mary: the Greek words αδελφός (adelphos, “brother”) and αδελφή (adelphē, “sister”) could also mean “kinsman” or “kinswoman,” and especially in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, from which these traditions were originally passed down, there was no word for “cousin.” Jesus’s “brethren” are said to be either children of Joseph by a prior marriage (an early view), or cousins (the current view, with some scriptural support).

    • UPDATE: See my expanded post on Mary’s Perpetual Virginity: “Some light on the Perpetual Virginity of Mary”

  • Mary’s Sinlessness — Mary is said to have been a pure vessel, and never sinned in her life. This is the one with which I had the most trouble. The way Brad explained it to me, that really helped, is thus: Jesus was fully God and fully man. He inherited his divine nature from the Holy Spirit, and He inherited his human nature from Mary. For this reason, Mary’s human nature had to be free from the original sin of Adam.

  • Mary’s Immaculate Conception — Many people (even some Catholics) think this refers to the Virgin Birth of Christ, but this is something else that relates to the previous doctrine. In order for Mary to be born without the stain of original sin, she had to be immaculately conceived — through which she was conceived naturally by her parents (who tradition holds were St. Joachim and St. Anne), but shielded by the Holy Spirit from inheriting original sin.

  • Mary’s Assumption — Tradition holds that Mary, at the end of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into Heaven to be with her Son. Catholic dogma leaves open the question of whether she first died, but the idea is that this was her last moment on this earth. In Orthodox tradition, the Assumption is known as the Dormition (the going-to-sleep), and in this view, she died before rising to heaven.

    • UPDATE: See my expanded post on the Assumption: “The Assumption of Mary: Scriptures and texts”

  • Mary as Queen of Heaven — Many Protestants think this is a granting to Mary of heavenly authority, making a goddess of her, but it is in fact a sign of her great honor in Heaven. Her Son is the King; therefore she, as his mother, is the Queen Mother — just as we accord high honor to the mothers of monarchs on earth.

  • Mary as Mother of God — this one really troubles Protestants — and it shouldn’t. The title arises as a translation of her title in the East, Θεοτόκος (Theotokos) — the God-bearer or Mother of God. Giving her this title has less to do with Mary than with Christ: By affirming Mary as the Theotokos, Christians were affirming that Christ was fully God as well as fully man: Mary bore God and not just a man. Anything less, such as the patriarch Nestorius’s preference for “Christotokos,” was interpreted as a rejection of Christ’s full divinity. Especially in the first Christian centuries, when Christological questions and heresies raged about the true nature of Christ, His earthly origins — down to the womb from which he was born — were of the utmost importance and concern.

  • Mary as Mediatrix — Scripture says that there is “one mediator between God and men,” Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5) — and Catholics fully affirm this, that Christ is our one Mediator to God. And we are fully capable of reaching Christ ourselves, through prayer; and He is with us in every Sacrament. But that doesn’t preclude the idea that there can’t be other mediators (i.e. people in between) between us and Christ. Just as we can ask friends and family members and pastors to pray for us to God — making them mediators — we can ask Mary and the saints to intercede for us. And Mary, by her special place and her unique relationship to Christ, is a powerful intercessor indeed, we believe. There is another side to this, Mary as the mediatrix of graces, that I will save for another time.

There are others to talk about, but these are the most prominent. There will be much more to come. If you have any questions you would like me to address or explore further, please do feel free to ask them. I am always looking for blog-fodder.

Tradition and Biblical Interpretation

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Codex Vaticanus

A leaf from Codex Vaticanus, one of the earliest extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament.

Tradition, I think, is a scary word for evangelical Protestants. But all it means on its letter is something handed down — from Latin trado: trans (over, across) + do (give) — something passed from one generation to the next, from one group to the next. As I’ve pointed out before, all Protestants, whether they admit it or not, adhere to some form of tradition. As Christians, everything we believe is by necessity traditional: it was not handed to us by God directly, but given to us by the Christians before us. Even the Bible is a collection of traditional writings: documents that were handed down to us from the Early Church. All Christians follow in the tradition of someone, whether it’s the Roman Magisterium, Martin Luther, John Calvin, or John Wesley. Ultimately, all Christians hope they are following in the tradition of the Apostles. If they are not — if they claim to be rejecting all tradition — then their Christianity must be seriously suspect.

Likewise, the way we interpret the Bible is traditional. Christians do not approach the biblical books as texts in a vacuum. Our readings are generally viewed in the light of the whole of Scripture. We read the Old Testament in the light of Christ’s fulfillment of it (with notable exceptions, such as the translations of the RSV and NRSV); we read the New Testament Epistles in the light of the Gospels and of each other. We approach Scripture with preconceptions of theology and doctrine. A prime example is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity: All orthodox Christians read the fullness of the doctrine of the Trinity in Scripture, but it is not at all written on Scripture’s face. We recognize the Trinity because the Church’s ancient theologians and exegetes have fleshed it out for us, hammered it out by generations of successive argument and refutation of heterodox views. Likewise is the doctrine of the fully human, fully divine nature of Christ and His hypostatic union. Even the canon of Scripture itself — what documents we accept as part of the Bible and what documents we reject — depends on the tradition of the Fathers of the Church in the first Christian centuries, arguing for and against the inclusion of various texts. Protestants read Scripture in the firm paradigms of their doctrinal traditions, whether Lutheran, Calvinist, Arminian, or so forth, appealing to the traditions and commentaries of great theologians of the past — with the result that despite their proclamation of sola scriptura, their understanding of Scripture is by necessity deeply rooted in tradition.

The Catholic Church reads Scripture in the same way — only with the whole of apostolic and patristic tradition behind its interpretations. As an historian (revisionists aside) builds his interpretations on those of his predecessors, the Catholic Church’s doctrinal framework is founded upon the traditions of popes, councils, great theologians and thinkers, all the way back to the Church Fathers, the first generations of Christians after the Apostles themselves. The Church proclaims its adherence to Apostolic Tradition, both that handed down orally and that written, and it is the early Fathers who attest to our traditions back to the hands of the Apostles.

As I have written before, the New Testament writings handed down to us are at best a fragmentary record of the teachings of the Apostles and Early Church; the Sacred Tradition handed down through the Church Fathers fills in the gaps and completes our image. But the Fathers also read and interpreted Scripture; and it is only in the light of their Tradition that we can properly understand the Bible. As for the historian, one of the crucial tasks in approaching a primary text, in understanding the thoughts and intentions of a writer, especially one of an ancient time and culture, is to understand how his words were received and understood by their primary recipients. The earliest Church Fathers, such as Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, are at most only thirty or forty years departed from the writing of the New Testament: they are the New Testament’s primary recipients, and within living memory of the Apostles. To separate the New Testament texts from the understanding of these early Christians, as a strict reliance on “sola scriptura” does — to read the New Testament in a presentist view, without the light of the interpretations of the Early Church — risks taking it out of context, or else grossly misinterpreting it.

Some Protestants do read the Church Fathers — but many are selective in their readings, reading the parts of Augustine especially, for example, that seem to support their Reformation theologies. Taking the Church Fathers, or any writer, out of their historical context in this way is as dangerous as it is with Scripture. For Augustine was a bishop of the Roman Church, operating in and upholding its traditions. His views must be interpreted against his position and his entire belief system; he would not have sanctioned his doctrines being used to support any theology that opposed the Catholic Church.

The fact of the multiplicity of Protestant readings and interpretations of Scripture — that there is less doctrinal agreement among Protestant churches than at any time prior — that there are more fragmented Protestant denominations than ever before (more than 33,000) — proclaims the utter failure of sola scriptura, and the danger of severing the interpretation of Scripture from tradition and authority. This is not a new phenomenon with Protestants: at the root of every heresy has been the decision to reject traditional doctrine and follow one’s own interpretation.

Before I began converting, the idea of giving up one’s personal, individualistic interpretation of Scripture to accept the teachings of a rigid and authoritative institution seemed to be an anti-intellectual subjugation of individual thought and will, and a recipe for abuse. For couldn’t the Church teach that Scripture said anything they wanted it to say, to justify their extrabiblical traditions? Wasn’t the freedom of the Christian to think and read the Bible for himself the only insurance he had against manipulation and deception? But I now see that the truth is just the opposite. The Christian who is “free” from authority is much more susceptible to being misled and exploited. It is the authority of the Church — the authority handed down from the Apostles — that protects us, that ensures the integrity and orthodoxy of our faith. And this protection is built into the system: Today’s prelates cannot abuse their authority, they cannot introduce inventions or radical reinterpretations, because the root of their authority and their interpretations is the Tradition of the Church — which is open, accessible, and visible for any Christian to investigate and in which to verify the truth.

By Scripture Alone; Alone with Scripture

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(I am afraid this one gets a little preachy; possibly a little critical. As always, my heart is not to attack, but to rebuild.)

Gutenberg Bible

The Gutenberg Bible, the first printed Bible. (Wikipedia)

So continuing from my thoughts yesterday:

One of the most strident cries of the Protestant Reformation, and of Protestants to this day, is sola scriptura: by Scripture alone. Scripture, the Bible, was to be the sole rule and authority of faith and doctrine.

From an academic standpoint, I can respect this. It holds Christian doctrine and tradition to a very high, legalistic standard of proof. It demands that all belief and practice be absolutely attested to in inspired writing and stamped with divine approval. It demands written attestation by the Apostles — or by God Himself — before Christians put any element of faith into action. But is this a reasonable expectation?

As I wrote yesterday, nothing in our New Testament represents itself as a compendium or catechism of the Christian faith. No book claims to contain the sum of Christian truth. There is no demand or expectation in the New Testament that the New Testament writings alone should support, nourish, instruct, or guide the Church. At the time these documents were written, there wasn’t even any such collection as the New Testament. How could Paul, at the time he wrote his letters, have expected that his words, with those of a few others, would be the sole rule of the Church’s faith? Arguably, he and the other writers were aware that their writing was inspired by the Holy Spirit; but it is doubtful that they at the time would have understood their words to be Scripture — which to them referred to the Old Testament (though St. Peter in 2 Peter 3:15-16 apparently places St. Paul’s writings on the level with Scripture by the end of their lives, ca. A.D. 63–67).

It is evident throughout the New Testament that the Apostles’ primary mode of transmitting the teachings of Christ was through spoken preaching and teaching, not writing. Most of the Apostles were too busy doing other things, like evangelizing to the ends of the earth and dying martyrs for the faith, to write much. That Paul was such an effective writer as well as a tireless preacher surely had a lot to do with why Christ chose him. On every page of Paul’s epistles, he refers to what he taught to the churches in person, teachings that he does not repeat in writing. The Early Church, living prior to the New Testament being collected, received their Christian faith directly through the oral teaching of the Apostles and their successors, and could not have even comprehended an insistence on “Scripture alone.” It is a little ironic that a faith so focused on sermons and preaching should at the same time reject the oral tradition of the Apostles.

Some Protestant sects take this rejection further than others. Especially some of the older groups, such as Lutherans and Anglicans, have retained many of the external trappings of the Church’s traditions. I speak only anecdotally, I confess — I have a lot of reading to do about these churches — but I often hear Anglicanism referred to as “Catholic lite.” Many more conservative and traditional Anglicans are making the journey back to the Mother Church by the parish. I’ve never been a part of a Lutheran church, but through following Ken Ranos and talking to my friend Heather (who attends an ELCA church in California), I’m frequently nodding in agreement at all the similarities and parallels between our traditions. They take the attitude, it seems, that many of the traditions of the Church are valuable and beautiful and praiseworthy, and ought not to be discarded as long as they don’t hinder the Gospel of Christ.

Other churches, especially those descending from the Calvinist tradition, take the rejection of tradition much further. Here I’m on much more familiar ground, having been a part of Baptist and Presbyterian churches. The iconoclasm of Reformation Calvinists toward religious images is well known. It is evident to anyone who has ever seen or set foot in an evangelical church the extent to which their sects have rejected the artistic, ornamental, and architectural aspects of tradition. In doctrine, to a further point than Lutherans or Anglicans, these churches reject anything that is not written explicitly on the face of Scripture. The Sacraments of Confession and Confirmation are completely absent, for example — if not the notion of sacramentality itself. The veneration of saints, the very idea of sainthood, is gone. The attitude here, as I’ve heard from many Protestants, is that the absence of a tradition from Scripture is reason in itself not to do it.

This can, and has, been taken to extremes. The Seventh-Day Adventists and their ilk reject Sunday worship — which has been practiced by the Church since the earliest days — because it is not commanded by Scripture. The Churches of Christ reject the use of musical instruments in worship because there is no evidence of it in the New Testament. I encountered a “new wave” church in Alabama that had no pastor but professed to practice a “New Testament model of church organization.” I am not quite sure what that means, since the New Testament never lays out a model of church organization; but presumably it included elders and deacons. It is common to hear of Protestant churches that try to reconstruct the New Testament Church — but the New Testament gives only glimpses of the faith and practice of the Early Church; most evangelicals reject the authorities that would shed the most light, the Church Fathers. Some churches are even rejecting the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, and returning to such ancient heresies as Sabellianism and Arianism. I’ve talked to Protestants who readily acknowledged that some of the traditions of the Church are good things to do and hold, and have value and merit — but that their churches nonetheless reject them because they can’t find them in Scripture.

This seems to me to be an awfully lonely and barren place to be. By their strictness in living by Scripture alone, these churches are left entirely alone with Scripture. They have shorn themselves of all of the beautiful and wonderful things that have clothed and ornamented the Church over the ages: all of the history, all of the scholarship, all of the art, all of the music. They have spurned the fellowship of the heroes and martyrs, the great cloud of witnesses, who are a part of our spiritual communion in Christ. Even more seriously, they have cast away elements of the faith — the Sacraments, Holy Orders, Apostolic Succession — that make the Gospel work, that guide and nourish the Church, that protect her teachings and sacraments, and that keep her in communion with the Holy Spirit.

Most tragically, with these nuts and bolts and hinges removed, the Church has lost her unity. Since the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the breakaway Protestant sects have split, and split, and split again, until there are estimated to be upward of 33,000 distinct Protestant denominations (and this is a conservative estimate). There have been more new denominations formed in the past century than have ever existed in all the prior centuries combined. Many churches — the hundreds of thousands of independent or nondenominational churches — really are completely alone. Only the Catholic Church remains one and coherent in the face of this disintegration. The Protestant churches beyond are splintering.

But wasn’t the Reformation supposed to restore the Church? Wasn’t sola scriptura supposed to bring the Church back to the Gospel? Whatever may be said about the doctrine’s aims, without any kind of magisterial authority to guide the Church, disagreement about the interpretation of Scripture only multiplies. Sola scriptura is the linchpin of the whole Reformation, without which it would not have been possible to reject the Catholic Church, its hierarchy, or its Sacraments. It, more than any other doctrine, is the root of our continued disagreement, and our failure to reunite the Church. And it has fostered the individualistic, private interpretation of Scripture, which to this day has been more divisive than any other element in Christian spirituality.

Sola Scriptura and Sacred Tradition

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Bible

This weekend I met with my friend Josh the Baptist, my oldest and dearest Christian friend. Over the years he has not been the most amenable to Catholicism — he once told me, years before either of us had any idea I would end up here, that he didn’t believe Catholicism was Christian. But he has nonetheless been very supportive of my faith and my journey. We picked at some doctrinal and theological points the other night. Both of us realized points where we needed to learn and firm up our arguments. Iron sharpens iron.

I realized talking to him, as I am realizing more and more talking to other Protestants, that one of the fundamental obstacles standing between Catholics and Protestants, if not the fundamental obstacle, is sola scriptura for Protestants and Sacred Tradition for Catholics. For Protestants, Scripture is the sole, exclusive authority for doctrine. Catholics found their doctrine on the union of Scripture and Tradition. Not only is this divergence an obstacle to agreement, it’s even an obstacle to understanding. Protestants are so fixed in the sola scriptura mindset that the very idea of rooting beliefs in Tradition is foreign and incomprehensible. Likewise for Catholics, the idea of rejecting Tradition because it’s not in Scripture seems absurd.

Because Scripture and Tradition are two different vessels for transmitting the deposit of faith — both that which was written down and that which was spoken (2 Thessalonians 2:15 ESV). It makes little sense to a Catholic to reject the oral tradition of the Apostles simply because it was oral tradition. The Gospels themselves were written from testimony that had persisted in oral tradition for at least thirty or forty years. Neither Christ nor the Apostles made any attempt to compose a formal, encyclopedic, or exhaustive compendium or catechism of the Christian faith. The writings that make up our New Testament never purport to be the whole, complete body of Christian Truth — in fact, they admit of themselves that they are not (John 21:25 ESV). The Law of the Old Testament was self-consciously the whole, written legal code of the Hebrews, given to govern their people and their relationship to God. But the New Testament is a scattered collection of various documents, comprised of selective narratives for specific audiences; epistles written to specific recipients to address specific concerns; and an apocalyptic prophecy. We should receive these writings for what they are, and not expect them to be something they are not.

The Protestant argument is that the Holy Spirit preserved for us the sum of what we needed in Scripture. The Catholic argument is that the Holy Spirit preserved for us the sum of what we needed — in Scripture and Tradition. Personally, I find the Catholic argument more palatable and reasonable. As an historian, I highly value primary sources written by the hand of people who experienced an event, but I don’t reject other sources that received information secondarily and then declare that the only knowledge I will accept as true comes from the primary documents. A fair portion of the New Testament documents are actually secondary sources, not written by Apostles (Mark, Luke, Acts, probably Hebrews) but by their followers, who wrote down the testimony and teachings of others as they were passed down to them. (That number is even more, if you consider that Matthew and Luke appear to have used Mark as a source.) Yes, the Holy Spirit guided and inspired the New Testament writers — but just so, we believe that the Holy Spirit guided and protected the passing down of apostolic teachings through Sacred Tradition.

The New Testament never claims to be the sole rule or source of faith. No one prior to Luther attempted to make it so, nor would early Christians have found sola scriptura in any way comprehensible. St. Paul writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17 ESV) — but neither Paul nor anyone writes that Scripture alone is profitable or acceptable. In fact, just a chapter before, he had said otherwise (2 Timothy 2:1-2 ESV):

You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

What Paul is describing is oral tradition, the passing down of sacred teachings from generation to generation by word of mouth. This is the beginning of apostolic succession. Men chosen and approved were ordained to receive the deposit of apostolic teaching; so that by the succession of consecrated bishops, whose lineages could be traced back to the Apostles themselves, the Christian faithful were assured of the integrity, orthodoxy, and wholeness of their faith. As Clement of Rome wrote in ca. 95-96, a mere generation after the Apostles, himself a successor of Peter (1 Clement 42, 44):

Through countryside and city [the Apostles] preached, and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers. Nor was this a novelty, for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier. . . . Our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry.

And St. Irenaeus, a century later, in ca. 180 (Against Heresies, III.3.2):

[We confound the heretics] by indicating that tradition derived from the Apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops.

Most Protestants, whether they admit it or not, adhere to some form of extrascriptural tradition. It permeates the entire Church, in all that Christians do and how they do it. The basic order of worship, the singing of hymns following by the reading of Scripture and a sermon, is as old as the Church, but found nowhere in the Bible. The celebration of the Lord’s Day on Sunday, in commemoration of the Resurrection, rather than on the Jewish Sabbath, is a nearly universal Christian tradition (excepting Seventh-Day Adventists and the like), but found nowhere in Scripture. The bare bones of the Church’s liturgical calendar, Easter and Christmas, are observed by nearly all Christians and even most of the secular world, but not mandated by Scripture. Even the canon of Scripture itself, on which sola scriptura depends, cannot be derived from Scripture alone. The canon of the New Testament was hammered out through questioning and disputation by successive Church Fathers and councils over the course of the first three centuries. Likewise, the doctrine of the Trinity, taken for granted by most Christians today, is nowhere laid out plainly in Scripture. It took centuries of theological wrangling by the Fathers and councils, disputation with heretical sects and condemnation of numerous heterodox views, for the orthodox Trinitarian dogma to fully emerge.

More subtly and seriously, the schools of scriptural interpretation which shape the Protestant reading of the Bible, through sola scriptura, are firmly ensconced in tradition. Most Protestants raised up in a particular theological tradition — in Calvinism, or Armininianism, or Lutheranism, or Wesleyanism — tend to adhere to the interpretations that they are taught. They are likely to read and understand the Bible the same way their pastors do, and possibly the same way their fathers and grandfathers did. Protestants appeal to great theologians and exegetes of the past — to the tradition of biblical interpretation having been handed down — all while not recognizing that their Christian understanding is colored and supported by anything but sola scriptura.

Letting go of sola scriptura is probably a significant hurdle for many Catholic converts from Protestantism. It never was for me. I had been reading the Church Fathers for five or six years before I converted. I have admired the traditions of the Church for as long as I can remember. By intellectual training, I have learned to operate in a traditional paradigm, through history and historiography, citing authorities of the past as support for truth. A good year or two before I made any move toward the Church, I found that I had already given up sola scriptura.

The Onus of Reunification

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One of the biggest questions in my Catholic journey has been this: How does God view the Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant churches, and their schism with one another? God desires unity in His Church. St. Paul writes to us, “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10 ESV). The very fact of our disunity attests to our sinfulness: We have all fallen short. We have all failed to preserve the unity of His Church. We all share part in the blame — even those of us alive today, we who perpetuate the division and fail to ardently seek reunification.

I’ve come to believe, in my journey, that the Catholic Church holds the treasury of apostolic faith, the fullness of truth having been passed down; that it is the One (unus, single, undivided) Holy and Apostolic Church founded by Christ and the Apostles. Studying the history of the Church, I have come to see that the traditions of the Church are not accretions or inventions as I once thought, but have persisted through the great men of faith of the Middle Ages, through the great Church Fathers, all the way since the beginning, the faith of the Apostles. I believe that the Catholic Church represents an unbroken continuity of belief and tradition, from the Apostles to the present day.

Unbroken, that is, except for those who have broken away.* Being raised a Protestant, I always admired and celebrated the great Protestant Reformers. I still do — they were courageous men passionate about God and willing to stand up for what they believed. I cannot, even as a Catholic, paint the Reformers or the Reformation black. The Catholic Church certainly needed to be reformed in many ways — and in fighting back against that reform, she must share a part of the blame for the schism that ensued. I now consider that schism one of the most heart-wrenching and tragic events in all of history — the rending of Christ’s Holy Church, his Spotless Bride.

(* I am not abandoning Eastern Orthodoxy, either. I am only leaving it out of this discussion for simplicity’s sake, because the majority of us Christians in the West are Catholic or Protestant, and because I know comparatively little about the Orthodox churches.)

Protestant churches have borne much good fruit. Christ continues to be active in them, in teaching, love, service, and salvation. There have been many great Protestant thinkers and theologians — and I do consider their thought and theology great; they are worthy and useful ways for thinking about God and our life in Him. There have been many good and holy Protestant servants of Christ, who have fed the hungry, clothed the poor, bound up the wounds of the hurting, and won many souls for His kingdom. God, without a doubt, uses, ministers, and saves through Protestant churches.

So God is merciful and forgives us of our sins — even the great sin of breaking His Church into fragments. But is that enough? Is it enough to accept His forgiveness, accept the fact of our division as final and irrevocable — that what’s been done is done, and we can’t go back? That this is the way things are now? That our churches can’t break bread together, and that’s okay? To most Protestants (to me as well, not that long ago), the thought of rejoining with the Catholic Church is unthinkable. To many, it is outright offensive. To them, the Catholic Church had sinned and been corrupted; it needed to be re-created. But even supposing that were true — the fact remains that the Christian Church — the Body of Christ — is fragmented. Are we going to allow this to persist?

There have many efforts over the years at ecumenism. Mostly in recent times, this has consisted of getting some members of the various churches together to share and discuss what they have in common and worship together. I applaud this, and think there needs to be more of it: the more we all talk to each other, the more we’ll realize that we all share the same Christ, and that He doesn’t want us to be divided. Others, however, continue to attack our differences, and decry any ecumenical efforts. How can this be what Christ wants? Can any of these people really sit down with faithful Catholics and continue to believe that Catholics are not Christians? How can anyone believe that our God is so small as to exclude large bodies of believers from His Kingdom because of minor doctrinal differences?

I feel that the onus is on us to seek not just dialogue, but reunification of Christ’s Church. As we ever approach the end of the age, we will need each other — we will need to be One and whole as a faith — more than ever. Recognizing this need for reunion is one of the many reasons for my decision to join the Catholic Church. History has failed to prove to me that the Catholic Church has ever been “wrong” or “corrupt” to the point of justifying a break (everyone sins; but she has never departed from the Truth); and so, if she was not “wrong,” then she must still be “right.” And the onus is on me to do what I can to make reparation for my ancestors' mistakes (this probably applies to my ancestors other mistakes as well). I am just one lonely pilgrim, but in returning to Rome, I am doing what I can. And I am a part of an ever-growing wave. And I believe as this wave gains momentum, it will sweep up more than only individuals. I truly have hope to see whole churches, even whole denominations, return to communion with Rome. I truly have hope to see, in my lifetime, a reunification of all Christians.

Just as the blame for our division is shared among all Christians, I believe that in reunification, some ground must be given by all. I’m not an expert on this — more learned people than I have written whole books on the problem of reunification — but the baseline for communion with Rome would have to be, I think, accepting the authority of the Pope and Magisterium, and belief in the Sacraments. I think the idea of accepting an institutional church authority at all will be most difficult for many Protestants — but I’ve come to see that it’s necessary. From Rome’s position, I think there is plenty of ground to yield regarding practice: just as Rome is embracing many Anglicans and allowing them to preserve their Anglican identity and heritage, and just as the Eastern Catholic Churches are embraced in all their differences, even a “Baptist rite” or a “Presbyterian rite” could be accommodated. I can quite easily imagine the liturgy of a Baptist church that embraced Rome and the Sacraments, while still remaining essentially Baptist.

We are all Christians, after all. We all worship the same Triune God. We all believe the same things about Christ. We all adhere to the same creeds†, whether we proclaim them or not. Regarding the Sacraments, our differences of opinion are more minor than most people recognize. Unity is within reach — if only we are willing to reach out. The onus is on every one of us.

† Obviously, I am excluding those who don’t — Sorry. Y’all come on back now, too.

Another Analogy for Church Authority

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Here’s another brief analogy I thought of for the authority of the Church:

The U.S. ConstitutionTake the United States Constitution. It’s a two hundred-year-old document that has been amended twenty-seven times, and has been subject to constant and continuous interpretation and reinterpretation throughout its history. Suppose, though, you hand it to the founders of a new republic, and ask them to re-create the American government from nothing but that document. They could probably come up with something — but it would be rough, lacking definition. The Constitution lays out the framework of government that needs to exist, but it conveys nothing of how to implement such a government. It conveys nothing of the historical context in which the document was produced. It conveys nothing of the specific interpretations and definitions that have been worked out by the courts over the years.

In the United States, we’ve inherited a rich and complex legal tradition, not just from the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, but from English common law, several centuries of statute law, and other precursors and precedents. Whatever your position on constitutional interpretation — whether you are a strict constructionist, believing that the Constitution means what it says, on its letter, and that we should follow the original intent of our Founding Fathers in writing it; or a loose constructionist, believing that the Constitution is a living document, constantly evolving with the nation’s views — our understanding of the Constitution is informed by our legal tradition. To understand the original intent of the Founders, we have to read what they wrote and understand what they believed. To understand the Constitution as a living document, we have to understand the definitions and interpretations that legal minds of the past have hammered out. To create a replica of the United States government, we would need not just the Constitution, but the web of statutes that Congress has woven to implement it.

The Supreme Court, by virtue of holding the entire, unbroken legal tradition of the United States in its hand, and of being made up of nine men and women held to be learned and capable legal minds, is the highest authority of law in our nation. It alone has the power to interpret the Constitution with binding effect. In making their decisions, the justices of the Supreme Court consider all of the resources at their disposal: case law, the past decisions of the Court, the writings of the Founding Fathers and other legal minds, just to mention a few. Those decisions and those thinkers haven’t all agreed with each other, it is true; but considering this entire body of law, the Court can arrive at the correct interpretation. The Supreme Court has the authority to interpret the Constitution because that is the authority it was given; that’s what it was created to do; that is its purpose.

The Delivery of the Keys (Perugino, Sistine Chapel, Rome)

Christ giving the keys to St. Peter.

Likewise, the Church, by virtue of holding the entire, unbroken tradition of the teachings of Christ and the Apostles in her hand, and of being made up of the body of bishops held to be learned and authoritative by their merits and their inheritance from the Apostles themselves, has the authority to interpret the Scripture and Tradition of the Church. In making her decisions, the Church considers all of the resources at her disposal: Scripture itself, the writings of the Church Fathers, the dictates of bishops and popes and councils over the ages, just to mention a few. Most of all, she prays and seeks the guidance and discernment of the Holy Spirit. The Church has the authority to interpret Scripture and Tradition because that is the authority she was given by Christ — the authority to bind and loose, to decide points of interpretation of the law with binding effect, given explicitly to St. Peter.

Handing the Constitution alone to founders of a new government, detached from its history and tradition, is like handing the Bible to a new religious sect and asking them to create a church, sola scriptura. This is essentially what many Protestant groups have done — sought to create a “pure,” “biblical” church, with Scripture alone as their guide, without any accretions of tradition. Some have taken it further than others. Most Protestants, whether they admit it to themselves or not, are as rapt followers of tradition as any Catholic: they follow, with little deviation, the traditions of Luther, or Calvin, or Cranmer, or Knox, or Wesley, or even of their own grandfathers or great-grandfathers. Tradition pervades the way they worship, the way they practice, and most of all the way they interpret Scripture. They adhere to a body of essential Christian tradition that not even Protestants have abandoned: Sunday worship; the shepherding of a Christian flock by a pastor; the liturgical practice of baptism and Communion; the celebration, according to an established liturgical calendar, of Easter and Christmas; the canon of Scripture itself. Take even a “contemporary,” “hip,” “non-denominational” evangelical “worship center.” A worship service will begin with songs, followed by a sermon, in a tradition of order as ancient as the Church, but found nowhere in the Bible. Typically such a church’s doctrine — whether it even admits it has doctrine — is loosely Reformed or loosely Arminian; relaxed but nonetheless exclusive of certain doctrines rejected by the Protestant tradition (“oh, we definitely don’t believe that“). If sola scriptura is followed as rigidly as some Protestants insist, then some practices and doctrines must be excluded because they are not explicitly described in the Bible — for example, the Churches of Christ’s insistence on no instrumental worship, or the Seventh-Day Adventists’ insistence on Saturday worship. A church that literally followed sola scriptura, with no inkling of tradition anywhere in it at all, would be a strange-looking beast indeed.

Tradition and Authority

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Eyes to SeeOne of the greatest struggles in my journey of faith has been finding a point of authority in matters of faith. Protestants stress sola scriptura as a rule of faith — that Scripture alone is their authority. Especially those Protestants of an evangelical or fundamentalist bent believe that biblical doctrine is clear on the surface of Scripture, without any interpretation. But at once this presents a problem. If Scripture is so clear, and if biblical doctrine is so self-evident, then how do various Christians and various denominations reach such diverse interpretations and such diverse doctrines? And more important, how could I, observing intelligent, rational people supporting each position, and finding merit and value with each, discern between them? What gave me, a man, the authority to dismiss some views as incorrect and declare another the right one?

This problem perplexed and frustrated me for years. It was the source of unending turmoil, every time I dared approach it. During my time in the wilderness, and especially more recently, I tried on many occasions to study doctrine and theology and Scripture, and determine, once and for all, what it was I actually believed, and therefore what church I belonged in. But I couldn’t do it. Time and time again, I reached an impasse at the point of authority.

After years of beating my head against it, I reached a solution to the problem that satisfied me, I thought. If there was no authority — no point from which to argue that any position was any more correct than any other — then they all must be equally correct. The correctness of doctrine must be relative. If God saves souls and changes lives in a variety of different Christian traditions — and this I observed, and believed, and still believe — then all of our doctrinal differences don’t amount to a drop in a bucket in God’s eyes. It was a position of thoroughgoing ecumenism, or even doctrinal relativism; a belief that all (or at least all orthodox) Christianity was equally valid. One’s choice of a church was merely a matter of preference, of what worked for each person individually. This was comfortable. I learned to respect and value all different Christian traditions, to learn from them and seek to understand them (this is a lesson I hope I never lose). Deep down, though, my position felt empty. If the correctness of doctrine was relative, then ultimately, doctrine was meaningless and inconsequential.

This was the position at which I stood when I began this Catholic journey. I had written at length to myself about the characteristics and values I was looking for in a church, and planned to go “church shopping.” My ideal looked very little like the Catholic Church — at least, not like my preconceived image of the Catholic Church. It was only by a happy accident that I stumbled onto this road. Once again, I don’t believe in happy accidents.

In the very first conversation I had with Audrey about Catholicism — the first time she invited me to Mass — I mentioned to her, off the top of my head, one of the problems I had with Catholicism. It wasn’t even the chief problem, I thought, but one that seemed innocuous enough for an initial conversation. “I don’t like that the Church insists on interpreting Scripture for believers.”

Her response was simple, rational, clear. It made sense. It didn’t sink in at the time that it was the key to unlock my riddle, or that she was the only person who could have answered it for me this way. “I see it like authority for an historian. We base our arguments on authority, on the arguments and interpretations of the past. Each generation builds on what was done before and gains a deeper understanding of the truth. And the Church has 2,000 years of authority behind her interpretation of Scripture.”

The Gettysburg Address

A primary source (the autograph of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address).

As an historian, how do I discover the truth? I go to the source: I take the testimony of the most reliable, most primary sources toward the event in question. But sources don’t speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted. No source says, “This is exactly how it happened, and these are exactly its implications” — if there were such a source, then it, too, would have to be interpreted: Who would have the authority to write in such a way, and how could they be so certain? And so historians, naturally, also look to other interpreters of a source, to understand how that source has been interpreted in the past. Due weight is given to those interpreters who speak from authority — who were closest in time to the event, who knew the people and events and circumstances involved, or whose interpretations were qualified by extensive study or academic credentials. Historians build their interpretations on these older, authoritative interpretations, creating an historiographic, interpretive tradition, with each generation adding to the store of knowledge and furthering their understanding of the truth.

Likewise it is with the Church and Scripture. Protestants may treat the Bible as a contemporary, self-evident source whose meaning is clear to the modern reader; but the truth is that it is an ancient, 2,000-year-old collection of documents. The first step in interpreting it, necessarily, has to be understanding how it was received in its own time — how the first generations following Christ received and understood his words and teachings, and how the faith of the Apostles was passed down. This tradition is the essential context to interpreting Scripture. The Church Fathers — those learned men of the Church’s first centuries — commented on Scripture at length. Their interpretations necessarily have far greater authority than mine, that of a layman 2,000 years departed.

The Council of Trent

The Magisterium of the Church, assembled at the Council of Trent.

And even more important, the Church itself claims the ultimate authority to interpret Scripture, through the Holy Spirit. The Church, because of who she is, because of the tradition she has inherited, has a far greater authority to interpret Scripture than I do. The Magisterium of the Church — the bishops in communion with the pope, as successors of the Apostles — is alone in a position to speak with true authority.

This kind of claim to authority simply isn’t present in the Protestant world. The Protestant Reformation consciously severed all ties to authority. In most evangelical churches, the highest authority in matters of doctrine and discipline is the local church: authority rests with the pastor or the body of elders. And that person’s authority is only as strong as his personal integrity and ability. If the congregation doesn’t respect it, then its members are free to — and so often do — split away to form their own churches or denominations. Since the Reformation, in the absence of any unifying authority, Protestant churches have splintered into so many thousands of fragments.

But the Catholic Church has the authority to interpret Scripture and Tradition. It has the authority to teach the truth of revelation and doctrine. When my path lacked any definition at all, the Church showed me the marked road, and gave me a compass. And this is key that has at last made sense of my journey.